DOI Seite / Zitierlink:
https://doi.org/10.11588/diglit.68745#0052
TINTORETTO
picture which celebrates your glorious victory, executed at an
outlay of ten months of time and which has taken canvas and
colours and living to the amount of more than two hundred
ducats, without counting my labour, which would be more than
three hundred ducats, which I have given up in order to do this
work. Therefore I pray your Excellencies, who can have no wish
to profit by the poverty of my eight children, that you will have
compassion on me and give orders that I am to receive satisfaction,
so that, poor as I am, I may, with my family, continue to live near
your Excellencies, always ready to serve you with life and labour,
as I promised in my former petition. Humbly prostrating myself
on my knees with my eight children.’
October 1574.
After the victory of Lepanto in 1571, Tintoretto had presented
the State with a superb painting of the event, to which these letters
refer. The Council in 1574 voted him the post for which he asks ;
a broker’s patent in the Fondaco dei Tedeschi, a sort of sinecure
office, which was a favourite way of recompensing services.
It must have been a grief when this and much of his early work
perished in the fire which destroyed part of the interior of the
Ducal Palace in 1577, but, in the main, life flowed on peacefully
for the next fifteen years, his children grew up, his commissions
were more than he could accomplish. His services were in great
part retained by the Government, a band of followers gathered
round him, and middle life glided into old age. Presently Marietta
married, but continued to live on with her husband in the old home.
In 1590 she died, at the age of thirty, a shock from which her
father never recovered. Still he worked on bravely, and com-
pleted his great work of the ‘ Paradiso,’ and put the finishing
touches to his paintings in the Scuola di San Rocco. After this
he did but little work, but used to occupy his time walking in the
cloisters with the brothers of the Confraternity, with whom he
had been so familiar for thirty years, and in long meditations in
his old parish church. Besides which he spent much time at
Carpineto, a country place near Mestre, where he had bought
land. In 1594 he was suddenly attacked with an affection of the
digestive organs, with pain and sleeplessness which lasted for
24
picture which celebrates your glorious victory, executed at an
outlay of ten months of time and which has taken canvas and
colours and living to the amount of more than two hundred
ducats, without counting my labour, which would be more than
three hundred ducats, which I have given up in order to do this
work. Therefore I pray your Excellencies, who can have no wish
to profit by the poverty of my eight children, that you will have
compassion on me and give orders that I am to receive satisfaction,
so that, poor as I am, I may, with my family, continue to live near
your Excellencies, always ready to serve you with life and labour,
as I promised in my former petition. Humbly prostrating myself
on my knees with my eight children.’
October 1574.
After the victory of Lepanto in 1571, Tintoretto had presented
the State with a superb painting of the event, to which these letters
refer. The Council in 1574 voted him the post for which he asks ;
a broker’s patent in the Fondaco dei Tedeschi, a sort of sinecure
office, which was a favourite way of recompensing services.
It must have been a grief when this and much of his early work
perished in the fire which destroyed part of the interior of the
Ducal Palace in 1577, but, in the main, life flowed on peacefully
for the next fifteen years, his children grew up, his commissions
were more than he could accomplish. His services were in great
part retained by the Government, a band of followers gathered
round him, and middle life glided into old age. Presently Marietta
married, but continued to live on with her husband in the old home.
In 1590 she died, at the age of thirty, a shock from which her
father never recovered. Still he worked on bravely, and com-
pleted his great work of the ‘ Paradiso,’ and put the finishing
touches to his paintings in the Scuola di San Rocco. After this
he did but little work, but used to occupy his time walking in the
cloisters with the brothers of the Confraternity, with whom he
had been so familiar for thirty years, and in long meditations in
his old parish church. Besides which he spent much time at
Carpineto, a country place near Mestre, where he had bought
land. In 1594 he was suddenly attacked with an affection of the
digestive organs, with pain and sleeplessness which lasted for
24